Feeling working class: affective class identification and its implications for overcoming inequality

Using the Semantic Differential, 46 undergraduates evaluated as theoretically expected 12 social-psychological concepts as they themselves felt about each concept and as they thought hypothesized members of four social-class categories would evaluate them. The evaluation scores of the generally working-class Ss were much more similar to those projected onto the middle and upper classes than those attributed to the lower and working classes.

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Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.2307/2902995 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 54 (1) ◽

pp. 1-26 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Scott McEathron

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

The Real ◽

The Public ◽

Ann Yearsley ◽

Lyrical Ballads ◽

Real Language ◽

Class Identification ◽

Stephen Duck ◽

Critical Interest

Wordsworth's account in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads of the groundbreaking nature of his rustic poetics has long served as foundational to our understanding of Romanticism. Yet his representation of "the public taste in this country" in 1800 elided the presence of a decades-long tradition of "peasant" and "working-class" poetry in Britain. Figures like Stephen Duck ("The Thresher Poet"), Robert Burns, and Ann Yearsley ("The Bristol Milkwoman") had been the focus of fashionable critical interest because they were seen as embodying the very values of simplicity and rustic authenticity that Wordsworth claimed were absent from the contemporary scene. Though a review of this context exposes Wordsworth to charges of solipsism and historical repression, it also helps us to imagine how the pervasiveness of peasant verse complicated his efforts to establish himself as a legitimate conduit for rusticism and "the real language of men." While Wordsworth did not have to create a taste for rural subjects and pseudo-humble diction, he faced the more difficult task of creating a vital rustic verse that was distinct from peasant poetry. In staging confrontations between educated narrators and uneducated subjects, several poems of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, including "The Thorn" and "Simon Lee," dramatize Wordsworth's historical dilemma as a gentlemanly chronicler of "low and rustic life." Through these experiments in narratorial perspective, class identification, and social sympathy, Wordsworth establishes both the contemporaneity and the innovation of his poetic project.

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Class mediations, working-class lives and labour subjectivity in post-socialist Ukraine

The Sociological Review ◽

10.1177/0038026120915150 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 68 (6) ◽

pp. 1338-1353

Author(s):

Gregory Schwartz

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Middle Age ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

Apparent Absence ◽

Post Colonial ◽

Social Forms ◽

Class Identification ◽

A Site

This article contributes a post-socialist working-class lives perspective to the literature on class (dis)identification. Based on an ethnographic study of middle-age workers in the western Ukrainian city of Ľviv, the article problematises the apparent absence of workers’ class identification despite significant commodification and marketisation of society. Evidence presented here points to the potency of gendered, national, regional and post-colonial constitutions of the subjectivity of labour. Rather than being fragmented identities competing with notions of ‘class’, these constitutions represent a ‘site of conjunction’ of the changing global processes and local social forms mediating class. The article illustrates empirically and analytically the specific social forms that shape labour subjectivity in Ukraine, while theoretically locating subjectivities as arising from the intersection of various determinations, where social forms and material relations are internally related with and through each other, representing a complex unity of the diverse.

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Social Class Identification and Class Interest in Taiwan

Comparative Sociology ◽

10.1163/156913202317346737 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 17-41

Author(s):

Robert Marsh

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Working Class ◽

The United States ◽

Class Conflict ◽

Interest Theory ◽

Weak Support ◽

Class Interest ◽

The Social ◽

Class Identification ◽

Stratification System

AbstractAre social classes perceived as a meaningful source of identity in Taiwan? I explore this issue with data from a 1992 survey (N = 2,377) of the population of Taiwan. Respondents were asked, "If people in our society are divided into upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, working and lower classes, which class do you think you belong to?" Ninety-eight per cent placed themselves in one or the other of these six classes. The modal responses were "middle class" (41%) and "working class" (29%). Two tests are made of whether these responses are meaningful and consequential. First, I show that subjective class identification is rooted in respondent's position in the objective stratification system, i.e., the higher one's education, occupation, power and income, the higher the social class with which one identifies. The second test is the extent to which, controlling for one's objective position in the stratification system, subjective class identification has significant net effects on attitudes toward class issues (e.g, whether big enterprises have too much economic and political power). Class interest theory predicts that Taiwanese who identify with the "middle" or higher classes have a more conservative ideology concerning class conflict, while those who think of themselves as "working class" or lower are more likely to believe there is class conflict, to favor collective action by employees against their employer, and to think big enterprises have too much power. Multiple regression analysis provides at best weak support for class interest theory. Subjective class identification has a significant net effect on attitudes toward only two of eight class issues. While the Taiwan respondents are not generally conservative on these class issues, class identification appears to have little to do with whether one is conservative or nonconservative. A serendipitous finding concerns education, which more than any other variable had significant net effects on attitudes toward class issues. It is Taiwan's most educated who are the least conservative on class issues. This finding has parallels with what some observers of Europe and the United States have called the New Class. The paper concludes with a discussion of the reasons why class identification is only weakly consequential for class-relevant beliefs in Taiwan.

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The identity of class in Latin America: Objective class position and subjective class identification in Argentina and Chile (2009)

Current Sociology ◽

10.1177/0011392117749685 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 66 (5) ◽

pp. 724-747 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Rodolfo Elbert ◽

Pablo Pérez

Keyword(s):

Latin America ◽

Collective Action ◽

Working Class ◽

Service Sector ◽

Group Formation ◽

Class Identity ◽

History Of ◽

Class Identification ◽

Privileged Class ◽

Economic Concentration

Class identity is a key mechanism in the explanation of class-based collective action. For decades, this was particularly relevant in Latin America, where objective class inequality was persistent and there was a long history of collective action, originating in the workplace and expressed through unions and labor parties. Despite persistent inequalities in the region, since the 1990s scholars increasingly claimed that the relation between objective class position and subjective class identification weakened significantly, and that class dynamics centered on work were no longer central to explain group formation and collective action among the popular sectors. While in countries like Argentina scholars have explained these processes by focusing on the effects of the de-industrialization of the economy and the informalization of the job market, in Chile analysts have done so by emphasizing the growth of the service sector and the emergence of a middle-class society where ‘old-fashioned’ working-class identities have become irrelevant. This article questions these arguments based on a comparative analysis of the relationship between objective class position and subjective class identification in Argentina and Chile in 2009. The results show that class still matters. In both countries, people with a working-class position or a working-class trajectory are significantly more likely to uphold working-class identity than individuals with a privileged class position or trajectory. Surprisingly, the authors’ analysis also demonstrates that the overall rates of working-class identification are higher in Chile than in Argentina. The authors explain these unexpected results by looking at contemporary class-related phenomena (e.g. higher inequality and economic concentration in Chile) and longer-term class dynamics (particularly differences stemming from the ‘radical’ party–union configuration in Chile and the state-corporatist incorporation of labor in Argentina).

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Habitus Disjunctures, Reflexivity and White Working-Class Boys’ Conceptions of Status in Learner and Social Identities

Sociological Research Online ◽

10.5153/sro.2999 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 18 (3) ◽

pp. 19-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Garth Stahl

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Well Being ◽

Social Identities ◽

Valuable Insight ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

High Performing ◽

Class Identification ◽

White Working Class ◽

Institutional Habitus

The article primarily explores the social class identification of 15 white working-class boys at a high performing school in a socially marginalized area of South London where academic performance was routinely depicted as crucial to economic and social well-being. The research aims to consider the influence of a high performing school on the boys’ identity and the relationship between their identity and their engagement with education. First, a brief background on white working-class boys ‘underachievement’ will provide the context. Second, Bourdieu's conceptual tools of habitus, institutional habitus and capitals are examined. Bourdieu's class analysis provides a useful conceptual framework to address (divided) working-class masculinities in a high attaining academic institution. Third, semi-structured interviews focused on academic self-concept, social class-identification and subsequent rationales, as well as participants’ identification of who they considered to be a student they admire, provide valuable insight into understanding habitus disjunctures and learner identities.

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